{"id":257068,"date":"2025-05-25T23:18:21","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T23:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/business\/real-estate\/the-post-victoria-day-market-what-to-expect-in-the-home-stretch\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T23:18:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T23:18:21","slug":"the-post-victoria-day-market-what-to-expect-in-the-home-stretch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=257068","title":{"rendered":"The Post-Victoria Day Market: What To Expect In The Home Stretch"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\u201cAaaand\u2026..they\u2019re off!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Horse-racing fans will know these are the three most exciting words in the sport, although \u201c\u2026.at the line\u201d can be just as exciting.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m no horse racing fan, but it was wild to see\u00a0Journalism<\/em> come from way behind to win the Preakness over the weekend, running at what looked like a speed double the pace of the lead horse at the time as they sprinted down the home stretch.<\/p>\n

Ah yes, \u201cthe home stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is there a horse racing term that\u2019s become more of a commonly-used metaphor than \u201cthe home stretch?\u201d<\/p>\n

Geez, I wish I was in\u00a0the home stretch<\/em> of this blog post right now so I could go watch the fireworks, but alas, I\u2019m still\u00a0lining up in the gates<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I might not be a horse racing fan, but interestingly enough, it\u2019s ingrained in my D.N.A.<\/p>\n

My great-grandfather was a horse breeder.\u00a0 Or trainer.\u00a0 Or racer.\u00a0 Honestly, I\u2019m not entirely sure.<\/p>\n

But I\u00a0do<\/em> have a few relics from yesteryear, including this magazine which I keep among all the other memorabilia in my office\/man-cave:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That\u2019s my great-grandfather,\u00a0J.J. Fleming<\/em>, and his prize racehorse, Teddy\u2019s Sister.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Wikipedia, I solved the riddle in about ten seconds; my grandfather was not a trainer, or a racer, but rather an\u00a0owner<\/em>.\u00a0 Teddy\u2019s Sister won the 1954 Valedictory Stakes<\/a>, among other things, as noted in my rather late Internet search\u2026<\/p>\n

The modern-day horse racing world is fascinating to me.<\/p>\n

All those people and their ridiculous\u00a0hats<\/em>.\u00a0 The sheer amount of wealth involved.\u00a0 The history.<\/p>\n

But racing a horse hasn\u2019t really changed in 150-years, has it?\u00a0 You get on the horse, ride fast, and that\u2019s about it.\u00a0 Is there another sport that remains as similar today to what it was centuries ago?\u00a0 I mean, maybe\u00a0archery<\/em>?\u00a0 <\/em>Except, while shooting a bow-and-arrow is the same, the bow, the arrows, the target, and the technology therein has changed dramatically.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0finish<\/em> of any horse race also fascinates me but not for the reason you might expect.\u00a0 Sure, watching a horse win is interesting, but I find it equally as interesting to watch a third of the field pull up when it becomes clear that those horses have no chance of placing.\u00a0 Perhaps the strategy<\/em> wasn\u2019t correct or maybe the horse or the jockey just didn\u2019t have the strength, but either way, you never really notice how many horses quit with several hundred meters to go until you\u2019re shown the long-angle replay minutes later.<\/p>\n

As we approach the home stretch of the spring real estate market, there are bound to be winners and losers.<\/p>\n

There will be different strategies, and different levels of success and failure, and like any good race with a home stretch, there will be those that pull up well in advance.<\/p>\n

The post-Victoria Day market goes by\u00a0very\u00a0<\/em>quickly!<\/p>\n

Sure, there are six full weeks between now and July, but if you\u2019re the seller who targets the first week of June to list, then you have an offer date, then the offer date doesn\u2019t work, suddenly, you\u2019re only\u00a0two weeks<\/em> out from summer!<\/p>\n

Yes, there\u00a0is<\/em> a summer market, but most sellers try to avoid it.\u00a0 The school of thought is that once the kids are out of school, the parents don\u2019t have the time, wherewithal, or desire to focus on their real estate search.<\/p>\n

So pack these six weeks into a vice, give the handle a turn, and you\u2019ll know what the post-Victoria Day real estate market feels like.<\/p>\n

To be more specific about the inner workings of the market, here are some points to consider\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

There will be a flood of new listings.<\/h3>\n

Imagine being that horse, lined up at the gates, and having that gate fling wide open.<\/p>\n

\u201cI need to run as fast as I possibly can,\u201d the horse thinks.<\/p>\n

Is this instinctual?\u00a0 Is this a pattern of learned behaviour?<\/p>\n

Imagine what it\u2019s like to be stuck in the middle of that pack, with thousands of pounds of brute force smashing down on the ground every millisecond.\u00a0 Imagine the sheer power exerted!<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the mindset of the horse and the jockey?<\/p>\n

Is it fear?\u00a0 Is it excitement?<\/p>\n

Intimidation and pressure, or strength and stamina?<\/p>\n

The same thing happens after Victoria Day when our real estate market is flooded with new listings.\u00a0 Many sellers use the long weekend as their \u201cfinal push\u201d to prepare and thus hit the ground running on Tuesday or Wednesday thereafter.\u00a0 But a\u00a0lot\u00a0<\/em>of sellers have this same idea and the result is often more competition than in March or April.<\/p>\n

For the sellers and listing agents who have the best properties in the most sought-after locations and price points, which are presented in perfect shape, they need not worry.\u00a0 They\u2019re the front-runners with the size, speed, and stamina to get to the finish line.<\/p>\n

But everybody\u00a0else<\/em> is going to find it difficult to navigate that intense pack that\u2019s coming hard out of the gates.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a look back to 2017 (not including 2020 because of COVID) with respect to the peak of new listings in the spring market:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

May and June represented the peak in five of seven years.<\/p>\n

I expect the same to happen this year, and I think it\u2019ll happen literally the first day back \u2013 which is today, Tuesday after the long weekend.<\/p>\n

There are <\/em>a lot of active buyers out there and many have made offers on houses already and lost, and many are seeing May and June as their last chance to get into the market and close on the purchase before fall.\u00a0 Whether or not these buyers are aggressive enough to turn the market in sellers\u2019 favour remains to be seen\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

There will be a flood of re<\/em>-listings.<\/h3>\n

Many of the \u201cnew listings\u201d to hit the market in the next six weeks will actually be\u00a0re-<\/em>listings, ie. properties that were previously on the market but are now listed anew.<\/p>\n

Having said that, there are two types of re-listings that we\u2019ll see:<\/p>\n

1) Properties that were only listed a week ago, had a failed offer night, and now are coming out again at a \u201cnew and improved price.\u201d<\/p>\n

2) Properties that were either sitting on the market for months and\u00a0now\u00a0<\/em>have decided to re-list at a new price, or properties that were listed in January, February, or March, were removed from MLS for a while, and are\u00a0now<\/em> trying the \u201clast hurrah\u201d before summer.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t expect these listings to make an impact, however.<\/p>\n

Well-priced, in-demand listings sell.\u00a0 Period.<\/p>\n

Over-priced properties that are not sought-after do not sell.\u00a0 Simple.<\/p>\n

And as we have discussed throughout the last five months here on TRB, there are a lot of sellers who are either overvaluing their properties, refusing to put time and money into them, and\/or assuming that there\u2019s substantial demand for the property type when there is not.<\/p>\n

Consider your typical $1,300,000 starter home on the west side or the east side, which was listed for $998,000 with an offer date, but didn\u2019t sell.\u00a0 This property, re-listed for $1,299,000 will ultimately sell in the next six weeks.\u00a0 But when I put \u201cnew and improved\u201d in parenthesis above, it\u2019s because many of these sellers will take that same property and re-list it for $1,400,000, and the market simply won\u2019t accept that.<\/p>\n

On Victoria Day, I met with a builder who is looking to list his new project for sale.\u00a0 The\u00a0one<\/em> point that I wanted to drive home, above all else, is that buyers don\u2019t like properties that have been listed\u00a0eight times<\/em>!\u00a0 In fact, this backfires.\u00a0 Buyers typically reject this type of property because they assume there\u2019s something wrong with it.\u00a0 Or, in the case of a luxury home in the midtown area, buyers will decide, \u201cI don\u2019t want to be the person who\u00a0finally\u00a0<\/em>bought this house, which has been for sale for eighteen months.\u201d\u00a0 They see and feel a stigma, and snobby or not, they don\u2019t want to meet a neighbour at the playground in three months, tell the neighbour where they live, and then have the neighbour say, \u201cOh\u00a0you<\/em> bought that house!\u201d<\/p>\n

This should represent basic buyer psychology, and yet most sellers don\u2019t see this.<\/p>\n

I had a client reach out over the long weekend and ask me about a home in The Annex which has been up for sale for two years!\u00a0 My first thought: \u201cThis thing is over-priced.\u201d\u00a0 My second thought: \u201cThere\u2019s something wrong with this house.\u201d<\/p>\n

How can you think anything different?<\/p>\n

Tis the season for re-listings<\/em>, and come June, browsing new listings on MLS is going to have an air of familiarity to it\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

Many sellers will rush to market \u2013 and it will be noticeable.<\/h3>\n

Have you ever gone into a new home and found \u201cthe door to nowhere?\u201d<\/p>\n

I have.\u00a0 Many, many times\u2026<\/p>\n

Picture a newly-built house that looks pretty good until you get to the family room at the back of the house and find that there\u2019s a door to the yard but no deck!<\/p>\n

Alas, the door to nowhere.<\/p>\n

Every year at this time, we see properties listed that are 95-99% finished and I think it\u2019s a huge mistake.<\/p>\n

Buyers don\u2019t want to walk into a $2M, $3M, or $4M home and find that there\u2019s no back deck, but rather there\u2019s a sawed-off hockey stick jammed in the sliding door track and a hand-scrawled sign that says \u201cDO NOT OPEN.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buyers don\u2019t want to see a backyard that belongs to the 1960\u2019s bungalow that\u00a0was\u00a0<\/em>in place until the home was torn down in favour of this new McMansion.<\/p>\n

Buyers don\u2019t want watch their step as they navigate that outdoor space, afraid of stepping on a nail, while dodging mounds of dry concrete and other construction debris.<\/p>\n

We often complain that, in the pre-construction condominium world, a particular unit<\/em> might be finished but the common elements of the building are not.\u00a0 So consider what impact it has on a buyer when the house is beautifully finished but the front yard isn\u2019t landscaped, the driveway hasn\u2019t been paved or had interlocking-brick installed yet, and the back yard is non-existent.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0future promise<\/em> to complete the outstanding work isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

Buyers want to know what they\u2019re getting.\u00a0 They want to see it.\u00a0 They don\u2019t like guessing games.<\/p>\n

Not only that, there\u2019s a certain element of trust involved that the outstanding work will be done properly and at the same level of workmanship as the rest of the house.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m only using\u00a0exterior<\/em> issues as an example.\u00a0 We see lots of 95-99% completed houses listed for sale with kitchen appliances missing or a basement shower still needing to be tiled.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever been through a renovation, or better yet \u2013 if you\u2019ve ever built a house, you know that it\u2019s never done on time.<\/p>\n

So consider the builder who targeted the month of April for completion of his new project only to find that it\u2019s looking more like July<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A lot of these folks are going to be listing over the next six weeks and many of them will be offering homes that are incomplete\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

Offer dates will have a lower success rate.<\/h3>\n

How many blog posts have I written so far this year that deal with\u00a0offer dates<\/em>?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a topic that simply won\u2019t go away, but for good reason.<\/p>\n

Many properties are being listed with offer dates \u2013 that shouldn\u2019t be!<\/p>\n

Other properties are being listed with offer dates \u2013 that\u00a0should<\/em> be, but the seller, listing agent, or both are taking steps to ensure the house doesn\u2019t sell.\u00a0 Case in point: one of my teammates submitted an offer on a house last week amid six<\/em> other bids.\u00a0 After some lengthy back-and-forth with all parties involved, the listing agent informed everybody that they weren\u2019t accepting any of the offers and that they were re-listing at a higher price.<\/p>\n

I fully expect that house to be re-listed again\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026.in\u00a0September<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

On a long enough time horizon, the success rate on \u201coffer dates\u201d will correlate directly with the absorption rate in the market.\u00a0 It\u2019s simply a function of supply and demand, and when you have\u00a0fourteen\u00a0<\/em>offers on a home, suffice it to say, that house is far more likely to sell than when you\u2019ve under-priced the property and have received only\u00a0one<\/em> bid.<\/p>\n

However, in a post-Victoria Day market where typically listings spike, success rates on offer dates will decline.<\/p>\n

This was especially true in 2024 when I personally witnessed the success rates of offer dates on the east-side, in the starter-home price point drop from about 50% in April down to about 10% in June.\u00a0 I\u2019m not making these statistics up either.\u00a0 I had one tricky listing where I tracked\u00a0all<\/em> the offer dates below $1,400,000 and their success rates.\u00a0 I shared this with my seller-clients in a Google Drive worksheet in Excel.\u00a0 The success rate dropped about 5-8% per week, every week after Victoria Day!\u00a0 This was so exact, you could set your watch to it.<\/p>\n

By the time we hit end-June, maybe\u00a0one<\/em> out of ten offer dates was producing a sale that night.<\/p>\n

As I said last year around this time, \u201cthe cream rises to the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

The houses that\u00a0do<\/em> sell on offer date, even in a tough market, are going to be the best offerings and\/or the ones under-priced the most.\u00a0 Many people don\u2019t want to believe it, but extreme under-listing can work.\u00a0 One of my team offered on a house two weeks ago, listed at $849,000, then received twenty-two<\/em> offers and sold for just over $1,200,000.\u00a0 Now, to be fair, we figured this was a $1,200,000 house from the start.\u00a0 But had it been \u201cunder-listed\u201d for $999,900, would it have attracted the same amount of attention?<\/p>\n

One of the by-products of a lower success rate on \u201coffer nights\u201d is that as soon as the buyer pool notices, they\u2019ll start taking more of a wait-and-see approach.\u00a0 Over time, this might mean some buyers\u2019 \u201cstrategy\u201d is to simply wait out\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>listings with offer dates.\u00a0 But that remains to be seen\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

Agents will get \u201ccreative.\u201d<\/h3>\n

You can read \u201cdesperate\u201d if you want to, but that\u2019s not entirely the case.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also like confusing \u201cincentive\u201d with \u201cbribe,\u201d right?<\/p>\n

Just consider how, for many years, condominium developers offered ridiculous 4%, 5%, or even 6% commissions to agents who would bring buyers into sales centre, especially when those sales centres were having trouble moving units.<\/p>\n

Incentive or bribe?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t answer that\u2026<\/p>\n

Likewise, I often see listing agents offering increased buyer-side commissions when a seller absolutely\u00a0needs<\/em> to sell.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t exclusive to a May\/June market, of course.\u00a0 It can happen year-round.\u00a0 But as we find ourselves in the home stretch, I expect to see several instances of over-priced homes\u00a0not<\/em> being reduced but rather where the commission to the buyer agent is increased.<\/p>\n

We also see an uptick in things like vendor-take back mortgages being offered, even though virtually no buyer ever accepts, as well as advertising what\u2019s left on a rock-bottom, five-year, fixed-rate that can be \u201cassumed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will we see an uptick in the number of\u00a0ice cream trucks<\/em> being rented to sit outside of stale listings at open houses?\u00a0 Hopefully!\u00a0 Here\u2019s an idea that my team and I have latched onto, for what it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, \u201ccreative\u201d can also be used sarcastically to describe bad business practices, like listing a $2,000,000 home for $1,599,000,\u00a0without an offer date<\/em>, leaving it on the market for six weeks, and simply refusing any offer of the list price while berating the buyer agent for \u201cnot understanding market value.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many agents think that the only way to win the race is to create your own set of rules, but they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re still running the same race as everybody else, and the finish line doesn\u2019t move\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

We will see many properties listed for sale and<\/em> for lease.<\/h3>\n

This is not the best way to sell real estate.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is area-dependent, but outside of condos and starter homes, I would say that the buyer pool is finicky and, at some times, snobby<\/em>.\u00a0 There are many buyers at higher price points who don\u2019t like any property with a stigma.<\/p>\n

A property listed for sale\u00a0and<\/em> for lease might not seem stigmatized to you, but to many, this feels like a \u201cbuilder house\u201d or an \u201cinvestment property\u201d and not a warm, loving, cherished \u201cfamily home\u201d where one chapter is ending and another is beginning.<\/p>\n

Yes, I\u2019m romanticizing it.\u00a0 But I work with buyers and I know how they think.<\/p>\n

Down the home stretch of this spring market, we\u2019re going to see many prospective property owners list both for sale and for lease in an attempt to \u201chedge their bets.\u201d\u00a0 If the market for sale<\/em> isn\u2019t strong enough and they decide to keep the property and lease it out, then they\u2019ll want to be on the market for lease\u00a0now<\/em> and not later.<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

This year has absolutely flown by!<\/p>\n

No matter who you are, despite your age or occupation, I\u2019m sure most of you can agree.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s going to be June in less than two weeks, I simply can\u2019t get over it.\u00a0 Weren\u2019t we\u00a0just<\/em> shoveling snow?<\/p>\n

Best of luck to all market participants, buyers or sellers, over the next six weeks.<\/p>\n

Now, somebody please get out their bugle\u2026<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n